A new exhibit opening January 24 at the Morgan Library traces the New York history of the classic children’s novel “The Little Prince,” written by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry on Long Island in 1942.

The exhibit, called “The Little Prince: A New York Story,” features 35 original watercolors and 25 pages (out of 140) drawn from Saint-Exupéry’s original handwritten manuscript, offering insights into the author’s creative process. Visitors can expect to discover forgotten sections of the novel, pages scrawled with Saint-Exupéry’s edits and cross-outs as well as the author’s unedited drawings.

The original text of “The Little Prince” contains multiple references to New York City, particularly to Rockefeller Center and Long Island. Though these passages were edited out before the novel’s publication, their presence in the original manuscript is a reminder that Saint-Exupéry was living in New York when he penned his most famous work.

Saint Exupéry’s New York Blues

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry arrived in New York City on the evening of Dec. 31, 1940, six months after France fell to German forces. He was unhappy in the huge, overwhelming city; he felt disillusioned living so far from France and the front. Sensing his unhappiness, Saint-Exupéry’s editor Curtice Hitchcock proposed that he write a story. Out at dinner with Hitchcock one night, Saint-Exupéry began drawing an image of the Little Prince on a napkin. Hitchcock wasted no time and began searching for a house far from the tumult of Manhattan, where Saint-Exupéry could escape and devote his time to writing his novel.

Saint-Exupéry found the perfect getaway in Northport, a small, calm village in Long Island. It was there that the author imagined the many whimsical adventures of the Little Prince. He scribbled them down in a lined notebook and sketched in the margins. Saint-Exupéry’s wife Consuelo would later call this home “the Little Prince’s house.” Saint-Exupéry remembered it as “a refuge, an ideal place to write.”

While thousands of Puerto Ricans returned to the island after taking refuge in the U.S. following hurricanes Irma and María, new data shows that more are leaving, continuing a longtime depopulation trend, El Nuevo Día reports. Between April and July, 6,910 more people left than came in through the island’s three main airports. The first trimester of 2018, by contrast, offered a net entry of 83,317 people, or 40 percent of the 211,695 who left during the previous hurricane season. According to census estimates, 431,942 people have left Puerto Rico since 2010, and by 2050 the island’s population (at 3.7 million in 2017) could barely top 2 million.
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Members of the Jamaican diaspora are meeting today, Nov. 17 and Nov. 18 at the Morrow Center in Morrow, Georgia for the Jamaica USA Diaspora Summit, reports Caribbean Today. Dr. Rupert Francis, Wayne Golding and Akelia Maitland are hosting the summit. “Often times our focus is on what is happening in our homeland of Jamaica while it remains clear that as Jamaican diasporans we are not organized enough where we live to exercise any significant power of influence over our future here,” organizers said. Link to original story →

"Undocumented black migrants are building an informal network to help each other navigate their uncertain immigration status in the U.S.," reports Law at the Margins in a story that's part of a series called "We the Immigrants" produced by its Community Based News Room. “We are so few that we haven’t built the mass movements that nonblack immigrants have,” says Nekessa Opoti, a Kenyan immigrant who works with UndocuBlack, an organization assisting undocumented black people in the U.S. “Systems don’t work for us, so we rely on each other.” Link to original story →

Marking its 20th anniversary, Colorlines is honoring 20 "transformative leaders who – in the spirit of our mission – use a narrative shift strategy to reimagine what it means to advance racial justice in areas as varied as environmental justice, gender rights, labor, education and religion." Individuals from investigative reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones to environmental activist Elizabeth Yeampierre to labor organizer Saru Jayaraman to poet-rapper Mona Haydar are profiled by Ayana Byrd, with illustrations by Sinomonde Ngwane. The honorees, writes Kenrya Rankin, "remind us that no matter how dark the tunnel gets, we can always create our own light." Link to original story →